HP's Accelerator and multicore optimization programs

Last week HP announced two new HPC performance programs. The new HPC Accelerator program gives accelerator vendors a path to qualify their offerings with ProLiant and BladeSystem hardware

HP offers customers best practices and guidance on these technologies to enable them to choose those that are most appropriate for their applications. The new HPC Accelerator Program also ensures that the latest acceleration technologies are researched, benchmarked and qualified for HP servers running HPC applications.

Current partners include ClearSpeed, Celoxica, NVIDIA, AMD, RapidMind and Mitrionics.

The Multi-Core (sic) Optimization Program (MCOP) was announced in June, and has been expanded

The program brings together developments from HP and its partners to provide open, non-proprietary solutions that enhance multi-core performance across a variety of industry-standard HPC architectures, platforms and operating environments. By optimizing multi-core solutions, customers can maximize application performance on multi-core systems, enabling larger simulations and more data analysis that is necessary to achieve their engineering, science and analytical goals.

New members of the program include: Allinea, Interactive Supercomputing, The Portland Group, RapidMind, Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab and Visual Numerics.

Customers will only feel so much excitement around HP’s “programs.” We’re basically talking about HP certifying third party gear, running some benchmarks and then providing a dash of marketing and engineering help.

Looking more broadly, however, HP’s somewhat forceful charge with this type of technology proves impressive. Big business customers embracing high performance computing technology are salivating over some of the accelerators on the market. And we’re also in desperate need of help with creating more multi-threaded code that can run on today’s four-core and tomorrow’s eight core chips. It’s good to see a vendor of HP’s size helping out on both fronts.

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